Leading from a Comfort Zone – A Leader’s Challenge

Often I hear executives talking about how the entry of a new leader in their organization sets into effect a bizarre reshuffle in the whole management staff. Processes slow down, ideas dry out in pipelines, animosity steps up, and mistrust builds all the while because someone at the top would like his own team to take over the existing set up.

When I was working in a bank several years ago, it was interesting to see how the entry of one man at the top set a speculative thought process that trickled down to all functional heads.

The functional heads started looking for openings elsewhere at a feverish pace fearing a backlash at them from the new man and his pals. The wonderful initiatives by my department were no more given any support because the whole department was set up by the previous man who was now a chapter of history.

The bank lost inspiring leaders, innovative ideas and much of its steam for a while till the key positions were filled in by a new team.

In retrospect I feel the phenomenon reflects a lack of trust and a sense of insecurity that leads to discrimination.

We have a tendency to file our bitter experiences with others as snap shots and we keep referring to them from time to time in dealing with new situations and people. So we view our past with ingratitude and this hampers our outlook on the present moment. We want to deal with the world in our way and we want to do it with the people who agree with us. We like to build our own comfort zones from where we like to engage with the world. That’s risky business for a leader.

It is really like drinking from your favourite cup; not realizing that the cup does little to enhance the experience of drinking itself. Or like going on a batting strike with your lucky bat when any good bat would do the same job. Except that a cup and a bat do not have emotions that employees do!

The insecurity that my power is fueled by familiarity is actually narrowing my own capacity to be more powerful. Ironically, not trusting an existing team creates more mistrust in an organization as the employees feel like resources; to be used and discarded when someone new comes in. It further fuels the hostile worldview because such a change at the top is ridden with conflict and disharmony.

Ultimately, it is the loss of the organization in change and really of the leader who fails to create more and more leaders wherever he has to serve, indiscriminately.

photo credit: European Parliament and Maja_Larsson